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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 12, 1919
Intimidation as Practiced in the Pittsburgh Steel District
From The Survey of November 8, 1919:
Closed Towns
Intimidation as It is Practised in the Pittsburgh
Steel District:—the Contrast in OhioBy S. Adele Shaw
[Miss Shaw spent the first two weeks of the strike in the Pittsburgh district for the SURVEY, and then crossed from Pennsylvania to the steel centers of Ohio, where civil liberties are preserved in the midst of the industrial conflict. A native of Pittsburgh, member of the staff of the Pittsburgh Survey, Miss Shaw brings experience as a social worker and as a journalist to her task of interpretation. The first draft of her article was submitted for criticism to public officials, strike leaders and mill executives. Facts were then checked up and incidents carried to their sources, and her narrative can be depended upon as the findings of a trained observer.—EDITOR.]
[Parts I-II of V]
I ARRIVED in Pittsburgh the evening of the third day of the steel strike [September 24th]. Through a gate to one side of me, as I stood in the Union Station, a line of foreigners perhaps twenty-five in number, Slavs and Poles, dressed in their dark “best” clothes, with mustaches brushed, their faces shining, passed to the New York emigrant train. Each man carried a large new leather suitcase, or occasionally the painted tin suitcase—a veritable trunk—appeared in the line. And there, not quite concealed by its wrapping, was the unmistakable portrait which one could picture in its setting over the mantle in the boarding-house just left. Men and baggage were leaving, as every night they leave from that station on that same train for New York and the “old country.”
Scarcely had the gate closed on the emigrant workers when a guard threw open an entrance gate through which marched, erect and brisk, a squad of state constabulary “Cossacks” they are called in the mill towns. Young men they were in perfect training—men with great projection of jaw developed, it almost seemed, to hold the black leather straps of their helmets firmly in place.
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